Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Michelle Oh’s work is personal, detailed, intimate and humbling, using family problems as inspiration she manages to detail the little things that we all love about the people important to us.

She writes;

The beginnings of this project came to me in a time of personal turbulence. My parents were separating after nearly 3 decades of marriage. In one of the letters my mother sent me, she used a funny analogy to describe the experience:

” It was said that when a couple came together in marriage, you are like this playdough, maybe one of you has blue colour, and the other has yellow colour. When you become one in marriage (or living together, not necessarily in the formal marriage), you are melting into each other, you are not blue anymore and the other is not yellow anymore. You become some kind of green. And when you need to separate from each other (divorce or else), you will not be able to go back to being blue and yellow. Both of you have changed into something else. That’s exactly how I felt. “

This analogy has stayed with me since then. I was old enough to understand why some things have to change in life, and that change is inevitable, but there was always a part of me that resisted this transience.

In an attempt to channel my feelings and frustrations productively, I decided to base my body of work around this idea. Each piece in my collection is in some way or another a collaboration between myself and my partner; whether in the actual textures captured, or by the circumstances in which they came to be. I wanted to create an object-diary, expressing and documenting our shared experience within a shared space through the presentation of textures we come in contact with on a daily basis.